For schools
The students plan it. You watch what happens to them.
Sixteen weeks, 15 to 25 students, no cost to the school. What follows is everything a head, a careers lead or a pastoral lead normally has to ask for.
Who it is for
Drifting students first. Not as a sanction — as a privilege.
A place is applied for and interviewed for. Nobody is put on Marmalade JAMS because of a problem, and nobody is told they are. In our experience that is precisely what makes them turn up.
Our recruitment priority, in order: young people who are drifting; high achievers who need stretching; young people identified as gifted but disengaged. A cohort that mixes all three works better than one that doesn't, because the departments need different temperaments. And a student who has been quietly working away, then finds their voice working the finance for a room of five hundred people, is the whole point.
We will say this plainly, because the opposite policy is commonplace: we do not remove students from the programme for patchy attendance. The young people whose attendance is patchy are the ones the programme exists for. We make them accountable.
The arrangement
What we need, and what we bring.
From the school
- A named staff contact who can be reached between sessions
- A room, after school and for some weekend sessions
- Help identifying and inviting the students
- Somewhere to display the cohort's own promotion
- A tutor available for the mid-programme evaluation meeting
From us
- The full sixteen-workshop curriculum, written and tested
- A mentor and a facilitator at every session, both cleared
- Industry contacts — venues, artists, suppliers, production
- The live event, and everything it takes to put it on
- Written feedback on each student, to the school, weekly
- Insurance, risk assessments and all safeguarding documentation
Safeguarding
The first-order question, answered before you ask it.
This section exists because it is what we would want to read first if the positions were reversed.
- Two adults in every session — a mentor and a facilitator, both cleared through the Disclosure and Barring Service. No session runs with one adult.
- Sessions are audio-recorded, both as a safeguarding record and so that mentors' input can be reviewed and reused with later cohorts.
- Application and interview before a student joins, so participation is consented to rather than assigned.
- Parental or carer consent documented for every participant, covering the programme and the event.
- Insurance and risk assessment covering every activity, including the live night and any off-site work.
- Full documentation to the school before the first session — not on request, as a matter of course.
On photography
We hold twenty years of event photography and we do not publish identifiable images of young people from it. Images of current participants are used only with documented consent from the young person and their parent or carer.
Evaluation
What you will be able to show, and what you won't.
We would rather be useful to you at the reporting stage than impressive at the pitching stage.
Marmalade JAMS ran a pilot at Cressex Community College in 2010. From it we hold the written endorsement of the Head of Year who hosted it.
The relaunched programme is designed, evaluated and communicated. The framework is NAOMIE — needs, aims, objectives, methods, implementation, outcomes, evaluation. Every workshop is minuted, and those minutes are the evaluation record. Written feedback on each student goes to the school weekly. There is a mid-programme evaluation meeting with the tutor, and a structured debrief after the event closes the cohort.
The first cohort of the relaunch produces the first dataset. The school that hosts it will have shaped how that data is gathered, and will own its share of it.
Thirty minutes on a call tells you more than this page can.
We will tell you honestly whether your school is the right fit, including when it isn't.